Following eight years with homegrown Tim Powers at the top of the Eau Gallie High football program, his departure led the school to reach across the state to Chris Sands, four-year head coach at Brooksville Central.

A former offensive lineman and a product of Florida A&M, Sands was the third new head football coaching hire of seven in Brevard County since the 2017 season.

Among his successes at Brooksville Central, he led a team that had won six games in five years before he arrived to 13 wins in four seasons. Sands made a name for himself by connecting players to college programs, helping 28 sign scholarship papers.

He spoke last week about the state of the program and his goals for it.

Sands: The biggest thing that Eau Gallie football has is just a hard-work mentality. I think they’ve always had that. I think it’s a community-based thing, but just the simple fact that the kids come to work every day putting their hard hat on and getting better in everything that they do. You can’t teach that. You can’t coach that, and these kids definitely have it.

Q: What are your goals for the spring?

Sands: Our goal is to win every game. We really have a really good team, top to bottom. Our 11 on the field, all the time, will be elite, and our goal every game will be to be successful and to win.

Obviously the end game is to turn boys into men, and I think we do a good job with the college aspect thing, but our No. 1 goal is to win every football game.

Sands: We’re installing two new playbooks, offensively and defensively. You obviously want to put the base stuff in and kind of install what we’re doing for the fall, but at the end of the day, that’s why we go full-on live for our spring game. We want to treat it like a real game, and at the end of the day, we want to come up with more points than the other team on that scoreboard.

Q: So, winning the game will be one of your top goals for that night?

Sands: One hundred percent. We want to see how competitive our kids are. Everything we do, we want to compete, and there’s no change on May 18 when that ball kicks off at 7 o’clock.

Q: How do you see the challenge of transfers, and how do you work to prevent it?

Sands: It’s not really a challenge for me, because once people meet me and know what I’m about, getting these kids to college and becoming men — we’re going to win a lot of football games here; that’s not the thing — but once they see me with the kids and see how I am, how I really take pride in getting these kids to college.

We look at a kid like Jarrad Baker, he had nothing when I got here, and now he has over 30 offers. Just those type of things, the hard work we put in for these kids, is going to keep them here naturally. I don’t have to do any recruiting or anything like that. They’re going to stay because they want to play football at Eau Gallie.

Q: Speaking of Jarrad, what are your theories about kids playing multiple sports?

Sands: The theory is every single player in my program will play at least two sports at Eau Gallie. If they don’t think they can play another sport, they’re going to run track, do something in track, but on their resume when colleges come, they’ll at least have two sports.

Q: Years from now, what one sentence do you hope people will use to describe Eau Gallie football?

Sands: Eau Gallie football is going to be exciting, and we’re going to play physical. Offensively, they’ve always been good, the past couple of years Tim (Powers) had been here, but I would like us to be a little more physical.

We’re going to be a team that people don’t like to play. We’re going to be guys that fly around, physical in everything we do.

Q: Are you seeing results with increasing numbers?

Sands: Yeah. Obviously, the numbers are what they are around everywhere. We want to increase them, but the thing about it is that we have the guys that want to be here. If they don’t want to be here, they can play another sport or whatever they’re going to do. We want guys that want to play football at Eau Gallie and want to put in the work like everyone else out here.

Q: How will you judge success at the end of the year?

Sands: A championship, whether it was a district championship, state championship, whatever it is. We need to bring championships back to Eau Gallie, because that’s what we came here to do.